Modelling the Appearance and Behaviour of Urban Spaces

Urban spaces consist of a complex collection of buildings, parcels, blocks and neighbourhoods interconnected by streets. Accurately modelling both the appearance and the behaviour of dense urban spaces is a significant challenge. The recent surge in urban data and its availability via the Internet has fomented a significant amount of research in computer graphics and in a number of applications in urban planning, emergency management and visualization. In this paper, we seek to provide an overview of methods spanning computer graphics and related fields involved in this goal. Our paper reports the most prominent methods in urban modelling and rendering, urban visualization and urban simulation models. A reader will be well versed in the key problems and current solution methods.